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Though it seems, somehow, that the people at WordPress want to turn itself into “an operating system,” — I can’t really see how, coz I don’t use WordPress for anything else other than blog — some very smart and all tech-wiz group of people have put together a blogging platform they’ve named Ghost. The biggest change is the way they handle your data dashboard.

They recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, and for 10 pounds you could get a digital download of Ghost (I suppose for install?), though the video to promote the project and some of the benefits of the campaign make it seem like you can also sign up for usernames (like WordPress.com?). Some of the stats displayed on the dashboard seems to suggest some time of system connectivity.

The other exciting aspect is its Markdown feature. The video makes it really really appealing to see how you can do almost magic to format and make your post pretty.

Of course, there’s also theme customization and the way it handles data, it seems that Ghost will work out across platforms and layouts. Flip it, turn it — just basic fluid design. Front-end and back-end. It seems that Ghost will let you work on post through your tiny mobile devices quite flawlessly, which isn’t one of WordPress strongest features. Then again, I hate having to whip something out on a smartphone or tablet.

You can check the Ghost features on their site, though it’s not yet available.

A few weeks ago, Google changed its image search to the rage of webmasters — especially bloggers of photographers. However, hits didn’t seem much too affected here. Maybe there was a 10% drop in hits, give or take. So I decided to keep an eye for it to check how affected the hits on the site were. It wasn’t until two or three days ago, when I installed Imaguard (besides having enabled Hot Linking, which has been on forever but doesn’t seem to work with Google Image Search for a reason — is that even ethical?) that I saw a BIG drop in hits. To check what was going on, I did a search on my most popular subject: “yu aoi” – the search is disheartening.

Before, when you used to image search for “yu aoi,” you would end up with a few tons of photos from my blog. Embarrassingly known as “amy the yu aoi fan,” Besides trying to avoid the posting of random picture spam with no data, I did try to do some research with my barely capable level of Japanese. For commercial work, I tried looking up at campaign names, and creatives involved — for photoshoots, I tried my best to post photographer names and maybe stylists. So people who were fans, would generally end up in my site.

Now when you search for “yu aoi,” there’s only one of my files showing up in the first four lines of images. Before, the first few lines used to be flooded with the photos I posted with details.

Everyone loves to hate Jetpack. I actually hated the fact that… 1. I was forced to switch WP-Stats for it, and 2. How long it took them to address the fact that Jetpack had a YouTube embed conflict. It took them so long, that I had to choose between proper YouTube sizing or web stats.

A few days ago, I got a new Jetpack update that told me I had two new features. The first one was… COMMENTS. I could finally have the same commenting features that WordPress-hosted blogs had.

Since last year, right around the time I changed this blog (I think), I have been eyeing the WordPress theme titled Chunk. UGH. You don’t know how much I wanted to use that theme.

It was so white and had a typographic base. But it’s not available for self-hosted blogs… not that I could find any download easily anyway. My only pet-peeve was that it was a one-column layout and it just reminded me so much of Tumblr. So many WordPress blogs now work like Tumblr.

ANYWAY, so I resigned myself. I couldn’t get Chunk, so I didn’t use it. Throughout these months, WordPress has been releasing a series of themes that I loved much — many of them paid, though — and I just couldn’t find the perfect project to have a paid template for.